


Patterns

by chiiyo86



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Claustrophobia, Dysfunctional Relationship, Insomnia, M/M, Post-The Blood of Olympus (Heroes of Olympus), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-27 23:39:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17171660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Nico keeps shadow traveling in his sleep into Percy's room. It kind of goes downhill from there.





	Patterns

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the ffa prompt fest, in answer to the prompt: "Post-canon, dealing with Tartarus (and other baggage) in the most fucked-up way possible, because they understand each other both perfectly and not all." I had a hard time figuring out how I wanted to end it, so I hope it's satisfying enough, unhappy as it is.

The first time it happened, Nico woke up badly disoriented. He wasn’t in his bed in cabin thirteen anymore; he wasn’t in any bed at all, actually, because he could feel that his face was pressed against a hard surface. It was scratchy, too, like carpet. His knees and chin hurt, and right before he’d awakened, he’d had that frightful dropping feeling you sometimes got when you fell asleep too fast. He’d been dreaming, but he couldn’t remember about what. From the choking, nauseous feeling that had lodged itself in his throat, he could guess that it hadn’t been a good one.

“Nico?” a voice said. It was someone he knew, but he felt too stunned to be able to place it.

He opened his eyes. He was somewhere dark, but he got quickly accustomed to the lack of lighting and then he could make out the rectangle of a window striated with the orange glow of streetlights. A siren echoed distantly for a few seconds. 

“Nico, what in Hades?”

Nico rose on shaky hands and legs. His throat burned as bile rose up, but he swallowed it back. He looked around, at the darkened figure of the boy he could see sitting up in bed and running a hand through his hair. He recognized the voice, now. He just didn’t know how in Tartarus he’d ended up in _Percy Jackson_ ’s bedroom.

“I’m, um,” he said, his addled brain putting the pieces together. “I think I shadow-traveled. Not, uh, not on purpose. I was asleep.”

“You mean you _sleep-shadow-traveled_?”

There was humor in Percy’s voice, as if he found the incident amusing. _Hey, remember that time Nico shadow-traveled in his sleep right into my room?_ Maybe he would laugh it off one day, but right now Nico thought it was terrifying. 

“I’ll go,” he said, then bumped against the corner of Percy’s desk. “Shit.”

Percy turned on the lamp on his nightstand and Nico blinked against the sudden glow. It made the room tilt sideways, and the back of throat tightened again with nausea. 

“You’re shaking,” Percy said. He sounded concerned, surprisingly alert, and was pushing his blankets back and throwing his legs out of the bed. “Just sit down for a moment. I’ll get you some water.”

Nico stared down dumbly at his trembling hands. They looked like phantom, disembodied limbs floating in the air, unattached to anyone and certainly not to him. Suddenly his legs wouldn’t hold him up anymore and he dropped on Percy’s desk chair like a stone. 

Percy came back with a glass of water—Nico hadn’t noticed him leave the room—and held it out to him silently.

“I feel weird,” Nico said. The coolness from the glass in his hand was the only thing he could focus on.

“I bet you do,” Percy said. His brow rippled like the surface of a pond whose waters had been disturbed. “Were you dreaming?”

“I think so.” Nico paused to sip from the glass. “Can’t remember what it was about, though.”

It was probably reckless of him to shadow-travel as soon as he’d finished drinking his water. But once he felt awake enough to realize what he’d done—accidentally teleported himself into the room of his former crush, in the middle of the night, talk about embarrassing—he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. 

\---

It would have been easy to rule out as a one-off, awkward incident, except that it happened again. Not even two weeks later, Nico woke up standing, in the middle of a shout, and facing a startled Percy in his bed. 

“Whoa, Nico!” Percy yelled, and in a flash Riptide had sprung in his hand.

“P-Percy,” Nico stuttered. 

His chest heaved with his breathing, his heart galloping in his chest as if he’d been fighting. That thought made him look at his hand, and he understood Percy’s alarm when he saw that he was holding his Stygian iron sword. He dropped it with a yelp, an absurd reflex—in an actual fight, this would have meant his death. 

“Are you… all right?” Percy asked, lowering his own sword.

 _I’m fine_ , Nico wanted to say, but he was so obviously not fine that it would be laughable to pretend otherwise. His whole body thrummed with adrenaline, all of his senses so painfully aware that it threatened to send him into overload. Percy’s breathing, the city noises outside, the soft humming of a fridge from somewhere in the apartment, all sounded like they were playing on loudspeakers. The alarm clock that displayed ‘3:46’ in bright green light was the only luminescent point in his vision field, the various indistinct objects swathed in the shadows of the room feeling like as many enemies lying in wait. He _had_ been fighting, he realized, fighting an assortment of monsters conjured up by his sleeping mind, overwhelmed by their numbers, just like when he’d been—

Nico took a deep breath and kept it trapped in his chest for a moment. He bent down to pick up his sword.

“Sorry,” he said. “I think I did it again.”

“Yeah, _that_ was considerably scarier than last time,” Percy said, pressing against his chest the hand that had been holding his sword a moment earlier. “What _were_ you dreaming about?”

“Don’t remember,” Nico said. This time it was a lie, but he could see no reason to share this with Percy. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” Percy said. He hadn’t been doing anything else either, because the light was still turned off and he was in his bed, but Nico wasn’t about to force him to talk about his problems any more than he wanted to speak about his. “This looks like a serious issue. Have you been doing that a lot?”

“Only that one time,” Nico said.

“So you’re only shadow-traveling to me, huh?”

“It has happened only twice,” Nico said, feeling defensive, and immediately was assailed with everything Percy could reply to this, _‘It’s already twice too many times.’ ‘You’re sleep-shadow-traveling into my_ room _, at_ night _, and you don’t think that means anything?’_ Or, worst of all, ‘ _Are you sure you’re as over me as you pretended to be?’_ There was a massive elephant in the room, and it was Nico’s confession of a few months ago. He wouldn’t blame Percy if he were uncomfortable. No one likes it when someone who’s admitted to having been attracted to you pop up in the middle of the night. 

Percy, though, said none of these things. “Are you okay to go now?” he asked instead. “You can stay for a little while, if you need to.”

 _That’s nice of him to offer,_ Nico thought dimly; but then Percy being a nice person was precisely one of the things that had drawn Nico to him. The rush of adrenaline that had alighted Nico’s body a few minutes ago was now fading, and the ensuing crash left him exhausted. His shoulders drooped under an invisible weight and it was becoming hard to think. If he sat down now, then he wasn’t sure he would be able to leave unless he slept for a few hours. 

“I’ll be fine,” he said, and gripped for the shadows all around him.

Whispers from the shadow road filled his mind, and, despite their familiarity, something about them made Nico’s insides freeze up. He shuddered, feeling the shadows hover within his grasp; not for the first time, he found himself stuck in a moment of absolute, heart-stopping fear that was greater for being unfounded. 

“Nico, what’s wrong?”

Percy’s too close voice made Nico jump so badly that his hand shot out without his control, clocking Percy on the side of his jaw. 

“Gods, I’m sorry!”

The shadows rustled around him. Without waiting for Percy’s reply, he made another grab for them and rushed inside. In an instant, he’d left Percy’s room behind.

\---

Two is a coincidence, three is a pattern. Whatever faulty wire in his brain made Nico shadow-travel in his sleep, it managed to keep him fettered for over a month before it happened again. When it did, it wouldn’t have been a real surprise for either of them, if Nico hadn’t crashed out of shadow right over Percy’s bed, falling across his legs. The collision was startling and painful for both of them; Nico, brutally awakened by Percy’s scream in his ears, instinctively rolled to the side and fell off the bed with a loud thump. He remained lying on the floor for a moment, unable to feel his legs and arms and struggling to breathe. He heard voices, a light from outside of Percy’s room being switched on. From where he lied Nico saw Percy’s feet drop on the floor as Percy got out of bed. Voices sounded out in the hallway; Nico heard Percy’s mom, Sally, as well as a male voice that must be his step-father Paul. He closed his eyes, focusing on the air as it entered and then left his nostrils, telling himself again and again that he was in Percy’s room and that there was enough air here for him to take a full breath. 

When Percy came back, he turned the overhead light on and the brightness that flooded the room made Nico blink back tears of pain. 

“Nico?” Percy called.

He sounded worried, and Nico realized that he couldn’t see him on the floor. Slowly, each of his limbs feeling stiff and rusty, Nico sat and gripped the edge of the bed to prop himself up. 

“Good, you’re still here,” Percy said. “Mom said—”

“You told your mom I was here?”

“Dude, you crashed on my floor. I had to tell her something. I mean, I guess she’s getting used to—Anyway, she said that you had to stay here tonight.”

 _Had to_ rather than _could_ stay here, not that Sally had any real means of stopping Nico from leaving if he wanted to. Although Nico wasn’t sure he could leave the place on his own power, except on foot, so it felt like less trouble to agree. It meant sharing a bed with Percy, but he was too drained to care much. He curled up on his side, threw the blankets over his head, and fell asleep surprisingly fast.

Not even two hours later, he was awake again, choking into Percy’s pillow. It was muffled, almost silent choking that made him feel like his lungs were being crushed inside a fist. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He kicked the covers back, which immediately did the trick. Feeling like he could breathe again he rolled on his back, blinking at the ceiling. Humiliation seethed in his chest. He’d been sleeping outside more often than not these days, and he thought he’d been getting better at controlling the claustrophobia, but apparently even just being tucked in a bed could still do him in. 

Right as he’d calmed down enough that he thought he might fall asleep again if he lied over the covers, his dozing off was interrupted by a gasp from Percy, who was lying next to him. The mattress jumped when Percy jerked, then Percy made a soft, whimpery sound and sighed. It was too sharp a sigh for someone who was still sleeping, so Nico said, fully aware of how inane the question was, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Percy said.

The sheets rustled as he sat in bed, and Nico imitated him. Insomnia felt a bit more bearable for having someone with him who was awake too.

“Nightmare?” Nico asked.

“The only nightmare I ever remember,” Percy said with another, world-weary sigh. “I’m falling forever, knowing that Tartarus is right under me. What about you?”

There was a specific kind of honesty related to being awake at an ungodly hour, sitting in the dark with someone else. Nico said, “The only dream I can’t control with lucid dreaming: they grab me from Tartarus and put me in that jar.”

He felt more than he saw Percy’s flinch. “I’m sorry,” Percy said. 

“What for?”

“For not getting you out of there earlier. For not—trying harder, I guess.”

“I’m still alive. Seems to me that you tried hard enough.”

Percy made a huffing sound, maybe disagreeing but not wanting to argue the point. The electric lighting from the street streaked his face with orange and black. His tousled hair looked like a haystack. Nico’s breathing was now deep and slow, like he was sleeping even though he felt wide awake. Was it the first time that they’d had any sort of honest, friendly conversation with each other? It felt like it was, and it gave Nico a weird sense of relief. Percy had been for him the source of heady, tormented feelings since the beginning of their acquaintance and it was cheering him up to see that he was capable of normal interactions with the guy. Who knew, maybe they’d become friends, one day, when Nico was a little less messed up. 

“I could have tried harder too,” he said, spurred on by Percy’s candidness. “When you and Annabeth fell into Tartarus, I could have—”

His only warning was the way the mattress sunk when Percy leaned on his hand and into him. Percy’s kiss got the corner of his mouth, too firm, too hurried. It caught him entirely by surprise and left him stunned, his mind going blank. Percy moved back and Nico heard him gulp, the sound incongruously loud in the silence. For once Nico couldn’t even hear any of the usual street noises. 

“What,” he said, “was that?”

“I don’t know,” Percy said, sounding as bemused as Nico himself felt. “I—felt like it?”

“What about Annabeth?”

Percy moved again, further away until he was sitting with his back against the headboard and a good few inches apart from Nico.

“Annabeth and I broke up,” he said shortly. 

“What?” Nico was so surprised that the next question escaped him, “What happened?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

The companionship from a moment ago had been replaced by a tension Nico wasn’t sure how to interpret. Why had Percy tried to kiss him, all of a sudden? Did he mean anything by it? And if he did, how was Nico supposed to react?

“So, what,” he said, shocked to hear how harsh he sounded, “you decided to try what kissing the closest gay guy at hand felt like?”

“What? No!” Percy exclaimed, holding out his hands. “I didn’t—it’s not like that at all!”

“Then what _is_ it?”

“I don’t know! I just, I guess I wanted to… feel something nice, for once. Haven’t had a lot of that, lately. Everything was supposed to be better, but it’s kind of not.”

Nico gritted his teeth. He wished he didn’t relate so much to what Percy had just said. Nothing in his current life was wrong, exactly, at least in comparison to how bad things had been before. Life at Camp Half-Blood was fine. His sister continued to be awesome. Jason was an unrelenting cheerleader who kept pushing him to get out of his shell, and he was getting friendly with some of the other campers. But as his circumstances improved Nico felt like he was crumbling inside, as if the stubbornness that had sustained him before was failing him now that it had nothing to push back against. He hadn’t mentioned this to anyone. He had thought no one would understand.

“I told you I was over you,” he said. “I don’t like you like that anymore.”

“I know,” Percy said. “I’m sorry, I crossed a line.”

As he said that, Nico felt a hand bump against his. The contact made his heart race. He could still clearly remember the moment when he’d realized he’d stopped putting Percy on a pedestal and could see him as a regular guy. At camp, Will Solace had been flirting with him pretty hard and Nico had just stopped being confounded by it and begun wondering whether he wanted to do something about it. But Percy was right there, needing someone even if that someone wasn’t necessarily him, and he had been at the center of Nico’s thoughts so much and for so long. 

“You asshole,” Nico murmured and then grabbed the collar of Percy’s shirt, pulling him to himself. 

There’d been a fifty percent chance that Percy would decide this was more gayness than he’d signed for and punch him in the teeth, but Percy let himself be drawn and he kissed Nico back eagerly. He threw a leg over Nico’s lap and sat on top of him, his ass dangerously close to Nico’s dick. They kissed until Nico’s lips were numb, messily, until he got hard and could feel Percy’s own erection against his hip and then against his stomach. He could feel the exact length and girth of Percy’s hard dick and it made the muscles of his stomach quiver with pent-up desire.

He stopped kissing Percy and pushed his face away so he could get some air, “What’re we doing?” he murmured.

“Dunno,” Percy panted against his neck. His hips moved and he rubbed his dick in the crease between Nico’s thigh and his crotch, his breathing hitching. “Don’t wanna think about it. Feels good.”

Since Nico had been asleep when he teleported to Percy, he was only wearing old boxer shorts and a thin layer of fabric separated his junk from Percy’s. The infrequent friction he got from Percy’s movements was maddening, so Nico looped his arms around Percy’s waist to hold him in place and he canted his hips to meet Percy’s. Percy let out a low groan and his hips moved faster, and then they were both humping each other with uncoordinated abandon, not even kissing anymore but just using each other’s body for pleasure. 

Nico didn’t think about anything but the feeling of Percy’s solid body against his, the sounds he made, the smell of his arousal in Nico’s nose. He came in his underwear and didn’t think about anything for a few long, blessed moments while the fog of lust dissipated. Without a word, Percy handed him a few tissues so he could clean up, which he did as thoroughly as he could even though his shorts remained a little damp. They fell asleep side by side, but not touching. Neither of them woke up for the rest of the night.

\---

Nico left early in the morning, while Percy was still asleep. He told himself it was best they didn’t see each other until the awkwardness had time to subside. He’d never had sex before, if what they’d done could even deserve the name, and he would never have imagined that his first time would be a one-night stand with his oldest crush. When he’d been so infatuated with Percy that he couldn’t see anyone else, he would have been devastated by how messy, clumsy and so obviously Percy working through his own issues the occasion had been. Now that he wanted to move on and only keep Percy as a friend, he was furious at himself for the set-back. 

He held to that resolution for an entire month. Percy must have been busy with school and he didn’t visit Camp Half-Blood—neither did Annabeth, Nico couldn’t help but notice. Nico occupied himself with taking a bigger part in camp life and trying to spend more time with Will, who for whatever mad reason seemed to like him. The days were mostly good. There were moments when Nico could imagine making a life for himself outside of the Underworld. The nights, though, were steadily getting worse. Any shred of control he used to have on his own dreams was lost to him. He started sleep-shadow-traveling more frequently and more wildly, ending up sometimes miles away from camp, in the woods, in people’s backyards, and on one memorable occasion, in the middle of a road. He tried to tie a rope to his ankle and the other end to the leg of his bed, which was when he discovered that the shadows would take care of the rope—convenient, if only it hadn’t gotten him taking a dip into a pond on a January night.

The resulting exhaustion started affecting his otherwise decent days. It dulled his emotions, covered the world with a grey veil, weighed down his limbs until every move felt like a fight. When he realized that the last good night of sleep he’d had was when he’d spent it at Percy’s after they’d fooled around, he shadow-traveled to Percy, this time on purpose. Percy was awake; now that Nico was thinking about it, he must have been awake every other time Nico had traveled in his sleep to his room. 

He turned on his bedside lamp and looked at Nico, unsurprised. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, as casually as if they’d just happened to wander into the kitchen at the same time. 

Nico shrugged. “Not very well, no.”

He hadn’t come with the specific intention of doing anything sexual with Percy; in truth, he wasn’t really sure what he’d come here for. Still, when Percy waved him to come closer, he walked up to his side, and when Percy pulled him down on the bed with him he didn’t try to fight it.

They made a habit of this. When Nico felt too keyed up for sleep, too claustrophobic, when he woke up somewhere strange with no awareness of having traveled, he went to Percy’s room. They made out, gave each other hand-jobs, sucked each other’s dicks, ground mindlessly against each other. And then they slept, sound, uninterrupted, glorious sleep for long stretches of time.

They didn’t meet or talk outside of it. They barely even talked when Nico visited. That brief moment of shared confidence, when Nico had felt the seeds of a possible friendship between them, didn’t happen again. They communicated with their hands, mouths and bodies, and they told each other of a frantic need, of a gaping wound they both carried and didn’t know how to deal with. 

Whenever he thought about it, Nico felt awful and ashamed. There didn’t seem to be any purpose to what they were doing; it wasn’t a relationship, nothing that had a future. It was just a crutch and there was no way it would end well. 

Three months after they’d started this non-relationship of theirs, Nico was sparring with Jason in the arena. Fighting, like sex, had the advantage of emptying Nico’s mind of the junk that tended to loom at the back of it, and Jason was an exceptional swordsman. Equal to Percy, Nico thought, and that mere thought of Percy was enough to make him falter and misstep, placing himself right in the range of Jason’s sword. Instead of taking advantage of his mistake, Jason dropped his sword and wiped his face with his shoulder.

“You want to take a break?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess I need it.”

They went to drink from the bucket that was put there at the intention of the sparring fighters. 

“I recently talked to Percy,” Jason said, and Nico almost choked on his water.

“You did?” he said in what he hoped was a casual tone.

Not casual enough, if Jason’s keen look was any indication. “Yeah, he had that same weird jumpy reaction when I mentioned your name,” Jason said. “What’s that about?”

“Nothing,” Nico said; too quickly, he knew. 

“You know, it’s funny,” Jason said, dropping the ladle he’d used to drink in the bucket, “but this is exactly what Percy said too. And I might have been inclined to believe him, but the coincidence seems suspicious.”

“It’s nothing,” Nico insisted, even as a blush rose to his cheeks. 

He refused to look at Jason and kept staring ahead, so he missed Jason’s expression when he sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Nico,” he said.

If there was one thing that Nico knew, it was that he didn’t know what he was doing when it came to Percy. That night he didn’t even try to fall asleep before he shadow-traveled to Percy’s room. Percy was sitting cross-legged on his bed, flipping the pages of a comics. Textbooks and copybooks were spread over the floor as though Percy had swept them from his desk. He didn’t look like he was trying to fall asleep. Nico wondered if he’d been waiting for him, if he waited every night regardless of Nico showing up or not, or if he’d known Nico would come tonight through some weird psychic insight. 

“I talked to Jason today,” Nico said, standing by the window with his hands in his pockets instead of joining Percy on the bed as he usually would. “He seems to have suspicions about… about the two of us.”

“Ah,” Percy said. He rubbed his face with a hand. “Yeah, when he said your name, I didn’t know how to react.”

“I bet,” Nico said acerbly, even knowing it was unfair; after all, he hadn’t known how to react either when Jason had mentioned Percy. “What are we doing, Percy?”

He’d never asked that question again since the first night. Like Percy, he hadn’t wanted to think too hard on the answer.

“What do you mean?” Percy said, playing with a hole in his sock.

“This thing between us,” Nico said, waving a hand, feeling his cheeks burn. He could do it, but apparently not talk about it. “Where’s it going? Is it going anywhere?”

Percy looked up from the fascinating hole on his big toe. He looked tired. They were rarely seeing each other in the light so Nico didn’t have a lot of occasions to notice the signs—the pronounced shadows under his eyes, his pallor, the new gauntness of his face. 

“It makes sleeping easier, doesn’t it?” he said. “For you too, right?”

“So does a sleeping pill,” Nico said.

Percy gave him a half-smile. “What we’re doing is more of a—well, a natural remedy.”

The attempt at humor only made Nico furious. “If you need a convenient hand for your dick, Percy, there are people you can pay for that.”

He regretted saying it even before he saw Percy’s face shutter. If Percy had been using him, after all, then so had he. What right did he have to be angry at Percy? They were one and the same, both gone through the wringer too many times and never put back together quite right. 

Yet he _was_ angry, the same sort of sizzling anger that he’d felt when he was way younger and both hated and wanted Percy too much to make sense of it. Percy had been his first impression of what a hero straight from Greek mythology should look like, and he’d kept that feeling in a corner of his mind for years. When that had ceased, he’d assumed he wouldn’t ever feel that tangled mix of emotions again, but then Percy had to go and screw it up.

Percy didn’t look heroic, right now; he looked fragile, uncertain and hurt. His mouth twisted and he said, “Why do you care, anyway? I thought you were over me. I remember you saying it several times.”

“I _am_ ,” Nico said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Doesn’t mean I want you to use me while you figure out your sexuality.”

Naked hurt fanned out across Percy’s face. He slid off the bed and stood up. “Well, you don’t have to keep coming here,” he said, giving his scattered copybooks a kick. “I’m not forcing you. _You_ ’re the one who keeps coming, even in your sleep.”

Nico hadn’t shadow-traveled to Percy’s room in his sleep for months, and the pointed reminder aggravated him further.

“ _You_ kissed me first!” he said.

“You kissed me second!” Percy took another step toward Nico, his hands clenched into fists. “What point are you trying to make, Nico? You confess your crush on me just to say in the same breath that you’re over it. You say you don’t care about me, but you make a fuss because we don’t have a proper relationship! Make up your mind: do you want me, or not?”

“ _Shut up!”_ Nico had come close to shouting, and he saw Percy wince and shoot a nervous glance at his door, probably worried that his parents would hear. They were always careful to be quiet, but Nico was tired of being careful so he said just as loudly, “Don’t turn the table on me! You should—”

In an instant Percy was on him, slamming a hand over his mouth. “ _You_ shut up,” he whispered fiercely. “For the gods’ sake, Nico, my parents are right _there_. Do you want them to hear us fight?”

Nico didn’t, not really, but he also felt contrarian. _Don’t tell me what to do!_ This was a childish reaction, and he knew it, and he was furious that he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t felt like a child next to Percy in a long while and didn’t relish the sensation. The longer Percy kept his hand on his mouth and the hotter his face burned. He bit one of Percy’s fingers as hard as he could, trying to make him let go, but this only made Percy’s grip tighten, his face pinched and his green eyes flashing. So Nico shoved his weight forward, suddenly enough that it made Percy lose his balance, forcing him to take a step back to keep it. Nico pushed harder until he had Percy against the wall. He pressed an arm across Percy’s throat, heavily enough to make it uncomfortable, but not to keep Percy from breathing. He felt Percy’s Adam’s apple move up and down as he swallowed.

At the position a memory came to Nico unbidden, from years ago when Percy had been mad at him for taking him to Hades without his consent. Their positions had been reversed, then. The first time Nico had masturbated to that memory had been the moment when the true nature of his feelings for Percy had been revealed to him. He felt the same now as he had then—too hot, too scattered, like he was a collection of pieces that didn’t fit and could feel them jostling loose. Percy was looking at him with wide eyes that held no fear, but a sentiment that Nico wasn’t equipped to decipher. Much less ambiguous, though, was the way he was hardening against Nico’s leg, and the short, jerky movements of his hips.

 _Styx, Percy_ , Nico thought desperately, something hot and messy squashing his lungs and making it difficult to breathe. He couldn’t talk, not with Percy’s hand curled around his mouth the way it was. But he had one hand free and he used it to open his jeans, and then Percy’s. He took both of their dicks and began jerking them off dry, the calluses on his palm rough against sensitive skin. It chafed and burned, and yet he could feel Percy’s dick dribble pre-come over his fingers, making it slippery and easing the way. He thrusted in his hand, rubbing against Percy, his balls tightening with his impending orgasm. He squeezed his eyes shut, his hand speeding up a little erratically. Percy said his name in a breathless voice. Nico’s dick pulsed in his hand and he grunted, the sound stifled behind Percy’s hand.

“Nico,” Percy wheezed out again, and Nico realized he was crushing Percy’s windpipe. He released him hurriedly and Percy coughed, then let his own hand drop so he could put it around his dick, his fingers bumping against Nico’s. Nico tumbled backward, unsteady on his legs. He watched Percy bring himself to orgasm with a strange detachment, feeling depleted from every ounce of arousal or energy.

Afterward, they cleaned up and rearranged their clothes in silence. If Percy’s mom walked into the room now, it would be really obvious what they’d been doing, even after they’d zipped up their pants, both of them still flushed and ruffled. 

“I think,” Nico said, fiddling with his skull ring, “that it’s better if we don’t see each other for a while.”

Percy sat on his bed, dropping his head down. He looked so defeated that pity filled Nico, dousing any leftover anger he might have felt. “Yeah,” he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“It’s hurting as much as it’s helping,” Nico said. At least it was hurting _him_. Maybe it had only been helping Percy and it was selfish of him to take it away.

“Yeah,” Percy repeated. “I’ve been using you. It’s not right.”

“No, it’s—” Nico said, fumbling for words and feeling terrible for being the cause of the guilt that laced Percy’s voice. “I was too hard on you. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But if you think that I don’t care about you, then you’re wrong,” Percy went on, still looking down. “I care. Maybe not in the right way, but I do care.”

 _What’s the right way?_ Nico almost asked, but he wasn’t sure what kind of answer he wanted to hear. The terrible, overwhelming urge to cry weighed down on his chest and he bit on his tongue to contain it. 

“I just, I’ll just go,” he managed to say.

Percy sighed and looked up, his face drawn with weariness. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

“Yeah, you too.”

Nico shadow-traveled back to Camp Half-Blood. Only in the privacy of cabin thirteen did he allow himself to shed a few tears. He didn’t even know who he was crying for.


End file.
